Volunteer
Yak Back Foundation is a small Arizona nonprofit that gives away AAC templates so people who are nonverbal or speech-limited can talk about the things they love. Almost everything we make exists because someone gave a few hours. Here is where a few of yours would go furthest.
Ways to help
- Test a template on a real device. If your child or student uses TouchChat or Proloquo2Go, import a new template, use it for a week, and tell us what was hard to find, what was missing, and what your communicator actually said. This is the single most valuable thing a family can give us.
- Speech-language pathologists and teachers. Review a template before it goes out, suggest the words a classroom actually needs, or tell us which vocabulary your students are on so we build for it.
- Know an AAC app we do not yet. Proloquo2Go we know. TD Snap, LAMP Words for Life, Grid and others we are still learning. If you build in one of them, an afternoon of your knowledge saves us weeks.
- Design and words. Picture symbols, plain-language writing, translation into Spanish, or photographs of real devices in ordinary rooms for the website.
- Spread the word. Share a template with a family who needs it, mention us to a school AAC team, or come to the Cardinals Climb.
What to expect
Tell us a little about yourself below and Ben will reply within a few days with something concrete to do. There are no minimum hours and no meetings for the sake of meetings. Volunteers never handle a child’s personal information; testing feedback comes to us from the parent or teacher, in their own words, and we publish nothing about a family without written permission.
Prefer email? Write to info@yakback.org. If you would rather give money than time, $250 funds one template from research to a tested file in a family’s hands.